Grad - Mercer

Abstact

This paper examines the origins of the student movements in Western Europe in the late 1960s by tracing the history of the rhetoric and reality of the expansion of higher education. In the early 1960s, intellectuals and reformers commonly decried the lack of university students, yet by the end of the decade “overcrowding” had become a recurrent complaint and an excess of graduates assumed to be one reason for the revolts of 1967-8. How was the expansion of higher education understood by intellectuals, politicians and students? How did the reality differ from the rhetoric and what was the precise link between the mass university and the politics of revolution?